NAS support in Snow Leopard?

Speculation about Snow Leopard is forbidden on the Discussions. You can find all publicly available information at www.apple.com/macosx/.

Given that Time Capsule is a NAS device and an Apple product, there would be little motivation for Apple to build in OS X support for competing products.

The main trouble is going to be which flavor or version of any NAS will work with different versions of a Mac OS? NAS is showing up as a topography solution instead of a true standards based technology. Give it a couple more years to settle down.

I've only seen one company actually advertise their NAS as being compatible with Time Machine. Netgear ReadyNAS has company support for the Apple's Time Machine according to their site. I don't use it, but they do have an active support forum. We decided to go with Leopard Server in the back room with a bunch of 1 and 1.5 TB drives. Of course, this works very well, but Leopard Server's not free or cheap.

Whether NAS works with Leopard, or continues to work with Snow Leopard or not is going to have to be determined. The fact that Netgear advertises that they support Time Machine means they will have to back up their claim with upgrades/updates and troubleshooting tech support.

Obviously, Netgear has done some research and design to make this work. NAS is a loose term, and most of the ones I see are based on free Linux Distro's. Here, you will get what you pay for. You will need to become a NAS and Time Machine expert to be able to ensure your devices work properly. Apple has not announced Time Machine compatibility with any other company's products, even with Leopard and we are not supposed to guess what they will do with Snow Leopard.

Very doubtful.

Besides the very good reasons already detailed, there's no hint in anything yet published. If they were going to make a major change, surely it would be mentioned. The only thing listed for Time Machine is "up to 50% faster backups."

Hello Pondini,

there is a possibility to store on a NAS with TimeMachine.
You have to make a SparseBundleImage with filesystem hfs+ and store it on your NAS with

YourComputerName_YourEthernetMacAddres.sparsebundle

You can create sparsebundles with the application harddiskutillity on your mac.

Achim

Message was edited by: Achim Bernlöhr

Message was edited by: Achim Bernlöhr

I have forgot an important detail.

On your local account you must modify com.apple.systempreferences.plist in the following way with your teminal:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Achim

Achim Bernlöhr wrote:
I have forgot an important detail.

On your local account you must modify com.apple.systempreferences.plist in the following way with your teminal:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Yes, this is one of the "hacks" that may make it work, to a degree, in some cases, for a while. It remains officially unsupported by apple (as is obvious from the Terminal command).

In a thread just the other day, someone was using this, and determined that while a selective restore could be done via +Enter Time Machine,+ neither a full system restore nor an Erase and Install and Migration would work.

Since it's unsupported by Apple, there's nowhere to go when there's trouble.

And you risk a future update preventing it from working at all, and/or making your backups useless.

I wouldn't trust my backups to that. If you want to, just be very aware of the risks.

It's nice that you have a hobby and can use some unsupported code for your advantage. On the other hand, my clients do not want to hack a fairly stable system with untested or unstable hardware/software hack solutions that could change or fail with any update.

Since the original question was about Snow Leopard, do you think that Apple would actually build half measures and decide to support flakey hardware from vendors who can't even get the USB or Firewire protocols to work well?

You are not building a backup system that can or will be supported by any vendor. When it quits working you will have to go back to the public forums for new hacks. Personally, I like to **** around with this kind of stuff for my own education, but would Apple suddenly decide to throw all standards in the can for Snow Leopard? We don't know what Apple is going to do, but we can pretty much tell what they have never done in the past.